Gipety: Audio Chats About Hacker News Threads
Gipety brings Hacker News discussions to life through community-created audio podcasts.
The Problem
Keeping up with new comments in long Hacker News threads can be a pain. It is particularly hard to grasp the chronological order of comments in a thread quickly.
This becomes a real issue when you have a successful "Show HN" post or a thread that has gone viral. You want to engage with your audience and respond to their comments, but it is hard to keep track of new comments.
How We Solve It
- Browse to a thread on Hacker News.
- Replace ycombinator in the URL with gipety.
- Voila! Each time you return to this new url, new comments will be highlighted and you can easily navigate through them with our pop-up panel.
A More Detailed Explanation
Let's start with a url like this:
https://news.gipety.com/item?id=41818420
When you browse to the above, we will make a client-side request to the hacker news api to retrieve the number of comments in the thread.
We will then redirect you to a url based on this template:
https://news.gipety.com/hn/:hn_item_id/k/:item_comments_count/s/:a_slug
Each time you refresh or return to the above url, we will make another client-side request to the hacker news api. We will compare the number of comments in the thread to the number of comments saved in the url.
If the number of comments in the thread is greater than the number of comments saved in the url, we will loop through each comment and highlight the new ones in green.
The slug is only there to make the url more human friendly. It is not used for anything else. It solves the problem for me of having many hacker news links in my notes that mean nothing unless I add a comment.